The digital music market exploded as it did thanks to — among other reasons — the laziness and/or venality of record labels, producers, and even the artists themselves: filling each album, cassette, and CD with ten pounds of musical Styrofoam and an ounce or two of, like, actually good music. When it became possible to purchase single tracks, it became possible to purchase just the good stuff.
Simon & Garfunkel have sometimes struck me as performers who did particularly well by becoming popular when they did — before consumers could pick and choose. They released only five albums together, over the course of only six years. Each of those albums was padded with so-so covers and original songs and experiments. (Come on, now: would you really spend 99 cents for your very own copy — for repeated listening, yet — of “Benedictus,” “Blessed,” “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night,” or “Voices of Old People”?)
And yet, every album also contained a handful of songs so melodically beautiful, so sweet-sounding, so achingly meaningful to young people… How could you not buy their albums?
Which became the other fact of life with a Simon & Garfunkel album: you listened and re-listened, over and over during the course of entire decades, memorizing every note and nuance, so that to skip over (say) the nerve-jangling “A Hazy Shade of Winter” from Bookends would throw the whole thing out of whack. Even if not actually crafted as wholes, those five albums became wholes. People fall madly, crazily in love with other people, seeing in them physical perfection despite lopsidedness, asymmetry, strabismus… and so it was with Simon & Garfunkel’s albums. Even now, people who were around then can hear a lyric from a lesser song — say, It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw — and be transported.
Of their albums, I’ve always thought the last, Bridge Over Troubled Water, to be a bit peculiar. I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes; I understand that the two of them had for some time been having the classic “creative differences” (and maybe personal ones too). Whatever the reasons, in BOTW they managed to assemble an album in which every song is no worse than charming, catchy, pleasant. It doesn’t feel (to me) to have been produced as an album, but rather to have been assembled from pearls found scattered on the floor after a lovers’ quarrel.
Among those pearls, “The Boxer” really shines, I think. There is so much going on in this song. The lyrics, and how they wrap around and within the unconventional rhythm without ever sounding awkward… And the music? A beautiful melody and (it almost goes without saying for S&G) beautiful harmonies in their two voices. And mysteries: I’ve always wondered what that sound is — an instrument? electronic effect? — which goes sort of wooba-wooba-wooba behind (for instance) the words “When I left my home and my family/I was no more than a boy.” In its excellent section on the song’s composition and production, Wikipedia doesn’t answer the question, exactly, but it hints that it might be a bass harmonica. (It also includes a great extended quote from an interview with Fred Carter, Jr., who played guitar during the recording.)
I’m not 100% convinced that the lyrics tell a coherent story (not that they need to). Wikipedia reports, “It is sometimes suggested that the words represent a ‘sustained attack on Bob Dylan'” — which strikes me as an even goofier implausibility. But whadda I know?
Anyhow, here’s that glorious pearl, “The Boxer”:
[Below, click Play button to begin The Boxer. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 5:13 long.]
[Lyrics]
As for Bridge Over Troubled Water, the BBC recently broadcast an American-made documentary about its making, The Harmony Game. The only related things I’ve found so far on YouTube or other video sources have been blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em “trailers.” It’d be nice to see sometime, though!
s.o.m.e. one's brudder says
The Boxer! FIRST single I ever bought – red and black Columbia label, 45 rpm, backed, I believe, with: “Cecilia”. Still in the “710 Singles” box in the basement. Eventually, I did tire from the “li-la-li” repetition at the end, and frequently will pass on it in my iTunes rotation for that reason. Still – a mighty fine tune for the duo. In a similar fashion, I can’t tolerate the successive “……Hey Judes!” at the end of THAT song.
John says
The Wikipedia article quotes Paul Simon, who apparently intended that chorus to be replaced by actual words but never got around to it:
You may be onto something here: a Midweek Music Break (like the one on “haunting songs”) about great songs which eventually become unlistenable. Other candidates? Anyone? (Bueller?)
Froog says
I think you caught me reminiscing once or twice on my blog about how I used to be an audiophile nerd in my college days, and would often go and hang out in a local hi-fi store and persuade the owners to let me go down in the basement to enjoy a “speaker demonstration”. I learned in those days that the percussive sound in the refrain to The Boxer (referred to at the start of that Wikipedia article as “an explosion”) is supposedly a whipcrack. And it is famously an ultimate test of a good hi-fi system because it peaks so fast and so high and so sharply. I saw what they meant when I heard it on a really good set-up in that basement. Most times you hear it, it sounds kind of like somebody slapping a cake tin lid or something. But, oh my god, when you play it on something really good, on vinyl, it makes you jump out of your skin.
John says
Never knew that about the whipcrack, but it doesn’t surprise me in one sense: it sounds like they threw everything they could think of into the recording session!
S&G seem to have been fond of sudden lunge-at-you-from-the-speakers sounds. At the very start of “Save the Life of My Child,” there’s a sudden LOUD bass something-or-other which often caused me to tear off the headphones (until I learned to expect it).
Froog says
On ‘great songs’ you tire of….
I’ve always hated the flute solo in the middle of The Troggs’ Wild Thing.
And I never did get the deal with Stairway to Heaven. For many years, it was placed at No. 1 in UK radio polls of the ‘Best Song of All Time’. I thought it stank up the Led Zep 4 album. “If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow…” I’ll be reaching for the sick bag.
s.o.m.e. one's brudder says
Stairway to Hell is more like it! Dante could not have contrived a more torturous torment for someone completely into the groove (and I do mean LP groove, here) of the rest of LZ4. Best thing I think has ever come out of “Stairway” is the number of music based comedians who have found great ways to either mock it, or integrate the melody into jokes on the pretentious intentions of so many rock “anthems”. Been on US charts as “greatest” too, but really that vs. “Satisfaction” or “Baba O’Reilly”? Really?
John says
I was never enough of a Led Zeppelin listener — let alone fan — either to have loved “Stairway,” or to have grown to hate it. But like you, when I’d see it on “best of” lists I’d go, like, “Huh?” Maybe by the time it came out the listmakers were eager to have SOMETHING from that specific chronological slot to add to the roster.
As I thought about this burgeoning “great songs we’ve learned to hate” notion, so far I’ve come up with one more addition: “Light My Fire” by José Feliciano. Lotmyfire-lotmyfire-lotmyfire-lotmyfire-lotmyfire — all right, enough already!
Nance says
I was one of those who bought every album and knew every note, every nuance. I survived my freshman year in college in ’66-’67–that sense of being shot out of the cannon of home and an over-protected childhood into a frightening world of war and political chaos and strange food and odd roommates and the English Dept.’s terrifying Dr. Rose–by dropping the needle onto an S&G album and thereby regulating my pulse.
There was just the right amount of irony, a huge sorrow, and a tormented (but knowing) vulnerability in the many of the songs on the first albums that made me feel less alone. It was hard to read in David Browne’s Fire and Rain about the dissolution of my heroes and the production of “Bridge,” but the tale does jibe with your impression…”pearls found scattered on the floor after a lovers’ quarrel.”
I skipped “Voices of Old People” because I had homework to do and crying wasn’t conducive to it, but I never missed “7 O’clock News.” I’d just watched that news in the dorm parlor and it needed a benediction. You know, I believe those same songs fit the mood of the country today, and I may need to haul out my CD’s. But, no. Sorrowing was still a romantic novelty at 18; now, my scaffolding is a bit too rickety to support it all.
Have you listened to Paul Simon’s album, You’re The One? I walked a fifty miles with those songs in my earbuds. There are shades in there of the old S&G.
John says
Last night I did a search of our satellite-TV offerings, looking for The Harmony Game. It’s being shown in HD next Friday morning at 6 a.m. (sadly, not Wednesday morning at 3:00), on some channel we don’t get, but I set it up to record on some VH1 channel — this morning, I think (hope).
The first few notes of “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” always have served that pulse-regulating function for me, especially coming as they do at the beginning of the album. Immediately soothing.
When I told The Missus about this post, she said — almost shamefaced — that she never liked Paul Simon’s music as much after he and Garfunkel split. I know what she meant. The synergy between the two of them was almost scary: very difficult for either one of them to match its power on his own. Still, I do love Simon’s, uh, winsomeness (?). I’ll have to give You’re the One a listen — thanks for the recommendation!
Froog says
John, I have to take issue with your celebration of the death of the album format (and the single format, come to that). Beijing able to buy individual songs robs you of so much context, and contrast, and slowly dawning interconnections, and accumulating resonances. With many of the great artists, the singles weren’t the ‘best’ songs on their albums, just the catchiest.
And don’t get me started on the demise of the B-side. I often got to love the B-side more than the A – if only for the snobbish pride in knowing that few other people had listened to them properly, if at all.
John says
I hope you know that I was a little reluctant to dance on analog’s grave, knowing that it would possibly agitate you to some degree. :)
I’m in complete agreement with you, actually, about best-vs.-catchiest numbers… especially because you qualified it a couple of ways: with MANY OF the GREAT artists. The number of non-great artists who released occasional great music — including “one-hit wonders” — is of course much larger than the number of great artists. And even great artists nod off sometimes in the production booth, or “coast” because they don’t have quite enough outstanding material to meet an album commitment. The albums that drive (drove) me crazy are ones like, say, “Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs: Greatest Hits Volume 2!” (or whatever — I have no idea if such a StS&tP album actually exists).
There may be a complex question of hypocrisy here for anyone who presumes to create any art, in any genre, musical or not. Would I object if, having worked on a book for several years, people decided to start downloading individual chapters they liked, and skipped the ones which they didn’t? You bet I’d object. So why would I be willing to dishonor the artistic vision of musicians who — for all I know — sweated bullets to get an album out in some particular form?
whaddayamean says
LOVE this song. one of my all-time favorites.
as always, you have succeeded in digging out info i didn’t know before.
John says
Gotta love the Web. :)
whaddayamean says
also i love this line:
rather to have been assembled from pearls found scattered on the floor after a lovers’ quarrel.
John says
Thanks so much. A last-minute addition, just before hitting the “Publish” button!
Jayne says
“‘sustained attack on Bob Dylan’”?? That is wacky.
There are several albums I wore thin memorizing the words, the harmonies, the segues. Carol King’s Tapestry was sacred–nothing could be played out of order, and no one but me could sing along. Seriously.
BOTW is in our 300 (or whatever crazy number of slots) CD rotation, mainly because it was put in so many years ago that it seems it shouldn’t ever be elsewhere. And we now spend more time listening to Sirius Radio rather than our CDs. But the last time we turned on the player BOTW came up for a spin and I heard my 14-year-old son wildly singing the lyrics to Cecilia, and thought, Hmm… time to slide that thing out of its slot. (I do love that song, though. ;))
s.o.m.e. one's brudder says
I do believe that I was about 14 when I bought this single backed with Cecilia. I had a paper to do for my 8th grade english class about a “popular” song, and I used The Boxer. Teacher was very impressed ( I have no idea what I wrote), but it was all really an excuse to listen to that fabulous “B-Side”. Breakin’ my heart, indeed…@ 14.
John says
You may (or may not) be familiar with this:
(Not exactly high-def, but you get the idea.)
Jayne says
John -Jubilation! (Glad I returned here–I must have not clicked the “notify me” button because I didn’t get response notifications.) Fabulous video–hadn’t before seen it. And I had to laugh because my son, while singing the song, looked just like the stompers.
Brudder- Very funny! But did you also clap your hands and stomp while listening to Cecilia (like me son did!)?
OK, so I can assume that the boy is a normal fourteen year old? ;)
John says
Jubilation indeed. (That’s one of those magic utterances for S&G fans, almost guaranteed to put them in mind of a song.)
It’s almost unimaginable to me that brudder might have done the Stomp thing, but I’m prepared for surprise. And no, there is no such thing as a normal fourteen-year-old, so you’ve gotta rid yourself of that ideal right now!
John says
Oh gawd. Tapestry was (and still is!) a huge repeated-play favorite for a lot of people!
That said, your mentioning it brings up a downside of the digital revolution (such as it is): the ease with which artists can make changes to fondly remembered works. I’d long ago lost my copy of the Tapestry album, one way or another, at the time I decided to download it. Listening to it provided a couple of shocks, after what used to be the perfect (as I remembered it) conclusion, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”: a song called “Out in the Cold,” and a live version of “Smackwater Jack.” Of course, once I realized they were there, it was easy enough to create a playlist which didn’t include them. :)
I got The Missus a Sirius subscription some years ago, but we get lousy reception in the car and (gasp) don’t have an indoor stereo at the moment… and she can’t recall her password for online listening. Thanks for reminding me that we really need to straighten that out.
Jayne says
John – that is a bummer. Can’t imagine the logic behind that. It’s like having the new edition of a great novel released with an entirely different ending. Crazy!
My husband has Sirius in both house and home. He’d be lost without it. No stereo? Now, I’d be lost without that. The internet or iPod just doesn’t cut it. Although I realize CD spinning is a bit dated, I still enjoy it! ;)
John says
I don’t think we’ll do without a stereo indefinitely. We can listen to Christmas CDs with our DVD player… but no more than one at a time. :)
(Plus, although the sound from the TV speakers is better than it might be, it’s a looooong way from how good it sounded when we had it hooked up to a stereo!)
John says
All: so glad to know that “The Boxer” seems to have connected on so many levels. Of course, I still question my taste in music; but this reassures me about my taste in friends. :)